I'm listening, as I write this, to a new album by Future of Forestry. I like it. A lot. Deeply Christian lyrics and superb musicianship. It's an unfortunately rare combination in contemporary music.
I charged my flat camera battery and found ten unknown, unremembered pictures. The view is from my deck, goodness knows when, though the EXIF data would tell me if I cared to look. Anyway, a gift from outside of my memory.
I watched the video of Trump and President Obama quietly loathing each other before the assembled press. One of them a President and the other who campaigned, not to be president, but to be autocrat. One of the most worrying things for me in all this last few months has been the vitriol heaped on the good man and the willing adulation of the corrupted one. It is here, and not in Trump's dim grasp of reality, that the real danger lies.
I look at my forgotten photos. A rainbow earths itself in my lovely city and God speaks as reassuringly to me as he did to Noah.
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When Donald Trump flew to Washington he was offered and declined the use of Air Force One. The reasons he gave were actually sensible. It's an old plane with grossly fuel inefficient engines. The President flies the globe in it, speaking from time to time on climate change and carbon footprints and all that, and all the while spewing unnecessary tons of carbon into the atmosphere. It's a symbol of all that so angers those who are not in the privileged elite to which I belong.
We liberals have won the culture wars, well, almost. We gained power, and guess what? The Kingdom of God didn't arrive with our well reasoned self interest. And those who are illiberal are pissed off at us for selling them a line. Perhaps we on the Left are being consigned back to the barricades: wjhich is where we actually belong.
But while the Democrats have been wrestling with domestic concerns it has continued the collective western worlds neo-colonial approach of importing goods and services produced at slave labour rates in third world countries with the resulting collapse of domestic industries. New Zealand is also complicit in this outrage.
To address this moral question (slave labour and domestic industrial decline) the response should be "Make America Moral Again" not 'Make America Great Again' a slogan which is wrapped in the brutal self interest of the president elect and as is as fatuous as the person who trumpets it. The only concerns for this guy are the old chestnuts of ego, power, money, prestige and privilege.
Ordinary working people in the United States deserve better than they have been getting for decades but a messiah in the form of this president elect that they have projected their hopes onto doesn't really seem from his track record and his approach (trickle down economics) to be anything but a false prophet of gargantuan proportions.
We live in interesting times, a time when the so called Bible Belt of the USA voted overwhelmingly for someone who to date has shown he is the antithesis of the Gospel - go figure.
But what scares me absolutely shitless is the prospect of a crisis in the USA. Imagine if 9/11 had happened when Trump was at the helm. Hitler seized absolute power with only 28% of the seats in the Reichstag by engineering a crisis and declaring a "temporary" state of emergency which delivered absolute control to the chancellor. At worst, the USA could slip into the worst kind of destructive totalitarianism. At best sheer bloody incompetence and vested interest could result in national and international decisions being taken which would be the ruin of us all.
But maybe he'll just sit back and let his cronies run the show while he gold plates the taps and fills the walls with crass paintings and nothing much will happen.